A review by whogivesabook
The Cathedral of Mist by Paul Willems
5.0
I'm still in awe. It is hard to put into words how perfect this collection of stories is.
It inspired me so much I ended up writing 8 short stories myself.
This collection is just breathtaking in its elegance. He manages to weave together threads from so many sources. Classic literature, life, art, film, mythology. And what you're left with at the end of each short piece is this sense of a world closing. I'd gladly step into any of the worlds he has written into being. Dark and crazy as they are. They are made up of fragments, sharp and beautiful.
Then again. I shared one of these stories with someone and they didn't understand it at all and it made me wonder if somehow the text on the page warps for each reader.
See, the thing about a collection like this is that it has weight. Every story is heavy with this yearning, haunting desire for truth. And I think that the guy I asked to read the story was just more of a fan of entertainment fiction. He finds the things that really touch his soul are songs. Which is fair. For me... It is literature.
We got into an argument about how I like the occasional pop song. He got just as passionate about it as I do about YA fiction. And we're both of the same heart really.... We want more from our art than your standard formula of rinse and repeat. We want to have tears in our eyes by the end of the experience. We want it to really carve our heart into a new shape and make life all the more sensory. As if life wasn't complete before we experienced this and, now that we have, we know it won't be complete until we have processed it.
It inspired me so much I ended up writing 8 short stories myself.
This collection is just breathtaking in its elegance. He manages to weave together threads from so many sources. Classic literature, life, art, film, mythology. And what you're left with at the end of each short piece is this sense of a world closing. I'd gladly step into any of the worlds he has written into being. Dark and crazy as they are. They are made up of fragments, sharp and beautiful.
Then again. I shared one of these stories with someone and they didn't understand it at all and it made me wonder if somehow the text on the page warps for each reader.
See, the thing about a collection like this is that it has weight. Every story is heavy with this yearning, haunting desire for truth. And I think that the guy I asked to read the story was just more of a fan of entertainment fiction. He finds the things that really touch his soul are songs. Which is fair. For me... It is literature.
We got into an argument about how I like the occasional pop song. He got just as passionate about it as I do about YA fiction. And we're both of the same heart really.... We want more from our art than your standard formula of rinse and repeat. We want to have tears in our eyes by the end of the experience. We want it to really carve our heart into a new shape and make life all the more sensory. As if life wasn't complete before we experienced this and, now that we have, we know it won't be complete until we have processed it.